Education

“An ideal education system is not one that simply teaches people how to make a living. It is one that teaches them how to make a life” – Anonymous

Today only a handful of schools have tried to move away from the conventional into the new methods of imparting education. This is rarer in rural India, where there are hardly any good educational institutions to start with. In such times, the BCT Residential Model High School strives to provide a holistic education model, and encompasses the goodness of academics, skill training and values. Known as the ‘Value based skill oriented rurally biased quality education’ model, this focuses primarily on three areas of

Instead of following the passive blackboard teaching methodology, BCT School has incorporated various new concepts and ideas to make academics more engaging for the children.

Ideas include:

• Having subject-specific rooms (Learning Centers) rather than class-specific rooms. Students thus move from one center to another while teachers remain stationary.
• No carrying of books as notes are made available at the learning center itself. Children utilizing the salient points given by the teacher, prepare notes in their own words.
• Using diverse teaching media in both print and multi-media
• Learning through creative learning skills and using self evaluation techniques.

How does this translate into performance? Here’s the sneak peek view of the Annual Exams for the Academic Year 2009-10:

Current surveys reveal that India today has many educated unemployed, but very few educated skilled workers. It thus emphasizes that all students be trained in some vocational skill, that will enable them to easily gain a job or start their own entrepreneurial endeavor or pursue technical education.

In this regard,

• Skills are imparted in the areas of electrical and plumbing, yarn spinning through Gandhian charkha, agriculture, tailoring and embroidery
• Students in each skill have received hands on training
• The income from the skills is distributed amongst children.

Social animation

Personality development is an important part of the BCT curriculum and is brought about through social animation exercises. These have a two-fold benefit: that of imparting confidence in children and that of making villagers aware of the need for social change.

A few aspects of social animation include,

• Training children in motivational songs and folk dances.
• Bringing village children to BCT for animation training. Taking BCT children to villages for performance of social animation programs.
• Bringing about awareness amongst villagers the impact of adults’ behaviour on children and the urgent need to change.

The need to integrate value education in every way possible was felt by the school. This aspect has been emphasized upon at all levels discussed above in the following manner.

• The values underlying each lesson are discussed by the teacher and students at the end of each class.
• Encourging children to implement the learnt values through their personal behaviour.

• The importance of working as a team is highlighted here.
• Children are taught to support their classmates rather than compete with them.

• All the school children get together every evening and sing bhajans for half an hour. This is followed by a short discussion by some children on how godliness helps in time of need.
• Children are also taught folk dances, motivational songs and skits.
• At the end of each day, children also get together to discuss the good deeds done by them and their peers on that day.

Operational for 15 years now, the system has experienced success rates of 100%. Most students have passed out with first divisions, proving their academic excellence. All are adept with hard-skills and soft-skills, aspects that give them plenty of scope both as workers or self-made entrepreneurs.

In areas where getting the pass-percentage (33%) was deemed sufficient, children of BCT Model High school were found to excel. In the year 2010, 21 out of 22 students secured a first-class while only 1 secured second class while the previous academic year, 16 out of 18 children secured First class while 2 got second classes.

The status of the children who have passed out the High School is given below:

Thanks to the generous donation from Mrs. Sudha Murty, Chairperson, Infosys Foundation, Bangalore, the High School has moved into its new 10,000 sq.ft building, equipped with computer in each learning center, computer lab, biological and physical science lab, library and vocational skills center.